Lord Samper's Library

They're rowdy, they're ragtag, they're misfits turned mercenaries for hire. Vox Machina is more interested in easy money and cheap ale than actually protecting the realm. But when the kingdom is threatened by evil, this boisterous crew realizes that they are the only ones capable of restoring justice. What began as a simple payday is now the origin story behind Exandria’s newest heroes. Episode 1: 'The Terror of Tal'Dorei' – Part 1 Episode 2: 'The Terror of Tal'Dorei' – Part 2 Episode 3: 'The Feast of Realms' I really wasn't in a state for anything, yesterday morning, (see yesterday's eventual post) and about the most I could stir myself to do was have a look and see if there was anything worth watching on Prime. I know next to nothing about 'Critical Role' (the people behind 'Vox Machina'), other than that it's a D&D thing on Youtube, but I do know that I love following dysfunctional groups of adventurers...

Sorry for the lack of post yesterday... I was with my kids and after that, I drank rather a lot of caramel vodka and danced (very badly) in my ex' friend's kitchen, as you do... ;o) Which kind of leads me into an apology for today's post being rather on the late side. It won't be any surprise that while I can drink a fair bit of caramel vodka, I don't deal too well with it the next day. Nothing that a lot of sleep and a quarter pounder meal can't solve ;o) So, that's me, how are you doing? What are you reading and are you enjoying it? I'm a long way into 'Priest of Bones' and it is turning out to be a superb read so far. I'm guessing you knew that already though, given what I hear on Twitter, it sounds like I'm the last one to the party (again). Oh well, better late than never ;o) I'm  hoping to finish it over the next couple of days and to get a review up later this week. And a few books have found their way to my place over the cour...

I don’t read crime fiction as a rule, apart from some Raymond Chandler back in the day and I’m not even sure if that counts really, but I will read pretty much anything that has ‘Demon’ in the title and Orenda books were happy to help me continue doing that, sending me a copy of ‘Demon’ in return for a fair and honest review. You may have noticed that the blog has been light on the review front this week and that is because I started reading ‘Demon’ and very soon, it was all I could focus on. Even after I finished the book last night, it was all I could think about. Let me tell you about it… In 1995, the picture-perfect village of Ussalthwaite was the site of one of the most heinous crimes imaginable, in a case that shocked the world. Twelve-year-old Sidney Parsons was savagely murdered by two boys his own age. No reason was ever given for this terrible crime, and the ‘Demonic Duo’ who killed him were imprisoned until their release in 2002, when they were given new identities and lif...

I’m well into Matt Wesolowski’s ‘Demon’ and while I could quite happily just sit and read it until I’m done, I didn’t want the blog to feel all unloved in the meantime 😉 It was time then to revisit my resolution to read more short stories, this year, and that’s just what I did last night. ‘Swords v. Cthulhu’ has already been featured here when I looked at Eneasz Brodski’s ‘Of All Possible Worlds’ but that was ages ago (well, April 2020 but it feels like ages ago…) so it felt like the right time to revisit the collection and a tale of a fight for survival beneath the earth… ‘Her sword in a high guard (what the old woman who taught her to fight called the Horn of the Bull), Angela advances deeper into the tunnel. She steps lightly, but does not worry overly much about remaining silent. For one thing, the iron scales sewed to her leather tunic clink and rattle with her every movement. For another, the beast she is hunting appears able to hear the slightest sound. For a third, she wan...

Before we get started, I’m warning you well in advance that this post is going to be horribly spoilery because, well… it just is really. I literally can’t write about this latest episode without talking about, you know who… So if you haven’t seen it yet, maybe you’ll want to go and do that first. It’s worth it, that’s the good news 😉 And as ever, no plot recaps here. I’ll leave that to those incredibly thorough people at Tor.com, they’re good at that 😉 If you’re still with me, let’s go. To cut a long story short, I’m getting pretty sick of saying the same thing every week although probably not as sick as you are of hearing me say it 😊 You’re probably wondering why I’m still watching at this point. Well that’s easy, there’s still a little part of me that will watch anything ‘Star Wars’ and ‘The Mandalorian’ built up a lot of credit in the bank 😉 I get down to it though and the bottom line is that Chapter 5 throws up all the same stuff that the previous four chapters have done...

THE ONLY BEAR ON THE C.I.A. DEATH LIST! ‘Shako’ is the eskimo word for the polar bear. It means simply... killer! When a US Air Force plane crashes within the arctic Circle, Shako the terror of the frozen wastes, is the first on the scene, getting his first taste of human flesh! Unfortunately for the CIA, the great white beast has also swallowed a top secret capsule which was being transported by the plane, and now they must track him down to retrieve it. This won't be an easy task, as Shako hates mankind. And what Shako hates, Shako destroys! I first came across 'Shako' in an old 2000AD annual belonging to a mate of mine. I can't remember a lot of what was in that annual now (apart from a story about a criminal who been released from jail in the future and travelled back in time to get his revenge on the Judges who jailed him, why didn't he just kill them in the future when they were really old...?) but one thing I do remember is Shako trying to eat a US Pilot...

It doesn’t seem like all that long ago but it was actually back in July last year that I took a look at the Fighting Fantasy background book, ‘Titan, the Fighting Fantasy World’. I love that book, by the way, but I’m not going into all that again. Have a look at my post, over Here , if you haven’t seen it already (or even if you have, I don’t mind). ‘Out of the Pit’ was the companion book, that went with Titan, and at the prices I’d seen previously, on Amazon and the like, I’d pretty much given up on ever owning a copy of my own. That was until I went into the British Heart Foundation shop, just before Christmas and saw a copy, sat on the shelf, and at a price I could afford 😊 And it went to charity so everyone won 😉 My copy is the smaller paperback edition but I'm using the larger cover art here as you can see more of it and it's worth it. I’ve been dipping in and out of this book, over the last few days, and have fallen in love with it all over again. From the darkest...

I was doing pretty well with the whole 'no new books in January' thing and then I got paid... To be fair, I needed a bit of cheering up as well, it had been one of those weeks, but even so, I fell and I fell hard :o) On the other hand, I feel a lot happier now! I'm going to see if I can make this the last 'big' book shop until next pay day. I'm also going to have to make at least some of these books 'priority reading' over the next few weeks. In the meantime though, come and take a look at what has turned up on my doorstep... ;o) The Guy N. Smith books... With the paperbacks, you have to grab them when they're cheap and these were going cheap so... ;o) These look like short reads so expect to see these turn up, in 'post form', very soon. The Polar Bear Comic... I haven't read this book since I was a lot younger (and I do mean a lot younger...) so when I saw it on offer, on Amazon, that was all the excuse I needed. Well, that and that glor...

It hasn't been a bad week for reading, still haven't managed to finish 'The God Is Not Willing' (one day...) but I can't complain at what I've read instead. I need to read a few more books off the TBR piles, there's some good stuff in there waiting to be read... ;o) There were also a few days where work got the better of me and I couldn't really get into anything after I got home, that's where I gave my brain a bit of a break and some watched some movies instead. They're all horror this week, let me tell you about them... (I'm copying and pasting blurbs, by the way, so beware of spoilers...) 'For the Sake of Vicious' (2021) An overworked nurse returns home to find a maniac hiding out with a bruised and beaten hostage. When an unexpected wave of violent intruders descend upon her home, it becomes a fight for survival. I'd seen a couple of people on Facebook really praise 'For the Sake of Vicious' so when it finally appe...

One of my resolutions for this year is to read more books off the TBR pile(s) and not spend so much money on all the other books that catch my eye. Well, ‘try’ not to… Anyway, this resolution led me to ‘My Heart Is A Chainsaw’; a book that (through no fault of it’s own) has been sat on my shelf for a few months. About a week ago, it was suddenly the right time to pick this book up and get stuck in. I finished it earlier today and… wow… What a read. One of those books where I had to ask myself why I hadn’t picked it up much earlier. Oh well, I got there in the end and that’s the main thing 😊 Let me tell you about it… Jade is one class away from graduating high-school, but that's one class she keeps failing local history. Dragged down by her past, her father and being an outsider, she's composing her epic essay series to save her high-school diploma. Jade's topic? The unifying theory of slasher films. In her rapidly gentrifying rural lake town, Jade sees the pattern in r...

There are still hardback copies of this book to be had but my copy is the Kindle version. I’d normally note that in the title (Guy N. Smith eBooks tend to be published via Black Hill Books) but all of his eBooks appear to have been taken down from Amazon, something to do with the management of his estate I think. But anyway… ‘ The Plague Chronicles’ is the last book on my HBR pile and while I would have got to it eventually, the particularly grim looking cover art piqued my interest (because deep down, I’m still that little kid who loved looking at the horror books in the newsagent, I think we all are really) and I read it over the course of a few commutes and at least one night where I couldn’t sleep. And it ended up being one of only a few Guy N. Smith books that didn’t quite w ork for me… It’s not a bad book but, I’ll try and explain… Trevor, Susan and their teenage son Mark are, to all intents and purposes, a normal family. And with the world in the grip of a terrible drought and...

It’s Wednesday so obviously it’s time to open ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ (I’m sorry…) and pick up from where we left off last week. Or go back in time via one of Boba’s dream sequences. Or, as is more likely, a little bit of A and a little bit of B. Can you tell that I just want this show to settle on one thing and just do it? 😉 Well, ‘The Gathering Storm’ looks like a step in the right direction… Today has given me a little bit of a kicking so this won’t be a long post, just so you know. As always, I’ll let Tor.com do the heavy lifting, as far as episode re-caps go , but I will be very spoilery today because so much cool stuff happened and I need to talk about it, just a little bit. Which is weird, given how I’ve felt about that over the last few episodes… Lets just get to the point. I’ve been moaning, for the last few weeks, about ‘The Book of Boba Fett’ and its insistence on prioritising ‘cool vibes’ over actual storytelling; it’s insistence on filling in gaps that didn’t need to ...

I’m starting to come back into the office again which means that my reading time is starting to open up again 😊 What it also means though is that I’m trying to get back into the habit of being awake on the bus, at silly hours of the morning, so that I can get some reading done. Easier said than done but I did see this potential pitfall coming, last night, and armed myself with a quick Warhammer Horror tale to get stuck into for the journey. These shorter reads tend to be the place for newer Black Library writers to cut their teeth, on the setting, before moving on to longer works, but Nick Kyme is a Black Library veteran who looks like he had a short story in him and wanted to share 😉 I’ve enjoyed Nick Kyme’s work in the past so that was all the invitation that I needed… In the aftermath of battle, Bucher, a medicae of the Astra Militarum, tends to the victims of war. Grievous wounds, vile contagions and more come his way, and he is ground down by his inability to save young Guar...

I'd forgotten that 'Moon Knight' was on the way and now the trailer is here. If you haven't seen it already, take a look... I know just enough about Moon Knight not to make a fool of myself acting like I know about the character... ;o)   It's looking good from where I'm sat though, I've got a good feeling about this one. Look out for 'Moon Knight', on Disney+, at the end of March...

This is going to be a short post as today has been rather horrible and I just want to get it out of the way, go to bed and pretend that it never happened. Because hiding from problems is always a good idea… 😉 There was a whole chunk of the nineties that was covered in Doctor Who books (‘The New Adventures’ mostly but some others from BBC books as well) and I completely missed out on all of them I think. At the time, I suspect that I thought that they would run along the same lines as the Target novelisations (albeit new stories, just very simply told though) and decided to give that a miss. Shows what I know but I’ll get to that in a bit. Doctor Who fans being what they are, I never came across a ‘New Adventures’ title after that, until a few months ago when I saw ‘Damaged Goods’ in the British Heart Foundation shop. Of course I grabbed it but it wasn’t until just before Christmas that I finally got round to giving it a go. And I’m glad that I did… The year is 1987 and there...

I'd promised my eldest that we'd go to the cinema and watch 'Eternals' but I didn't fancy possibly being sat next to Omicron so I decided to wait until it was on Disney+ instead. I'm glad I did actually because two and a half hours worth of movie... 'Eternals' isn't a bad movie, more on that in a bit, but two and a half hours... We were able to watch it in two instalments, over the weekend, but I'd have fallen asleep in the cinema, especially if the seats were comfy ;o) I've finally watched it though and 'Eternals' wasn't the best Marvel movie that I've ever seen but I've seen 'Thor: The Dark World' and the first 'Hulk' movie (not sure if that's MCU though but for the sake of this post...) so it's comfortably not the worst either ;o) Seven thousand years ago, the super powered 'Eternals' were placed on Earth to protect human civilisation against the hungering Deviants. Five hundred years a...

This won't be the last classic 'Doctor Who' story that I write about but it was the last story of the classic 'Doctor Who' era to air, all the way back in 1989. I'm still more about the stories than the 'behind the scenes' stuff so I'll happily admit that I don't really know an awful lot about what killed the show off the first time round. 'BBC politics' is the quick answer but I don't know much more than that. I'll have to go and look it up but I'm not going to regurgitate a whole load of Google here, no-one needs that ;o) Nope, none of that, we're all about the last classic 'Doctor Who' story and whether it was a good one to end an era on. I think it was actually, and I can't help but wonder if it was the sign of things to come had the show kept on going... The Doctor takes Ace back to her home town of Perivale, only to find that something is very, very wrong. Many of Ace's old friends and neighbours hav...

I’ve been looking around the flat, the last couple of days, and it turns out that I don’t just have the TBR piles, I also have an HBR (‘Has Been Read’ of course) pile that I’m going to be dipping into while I tackle a couple of longer books that I really should have read by now. And it wouldn’t be an HBR pile without a Guy N. Smith book in it… 😉 In what will be a shorter post than normal today, lets take a look at ‘Caracal’… When Bilal signs various official documents in order to get to Britain, he doesn't realise that he's being manipulated for cheap labour and will soon become an illegal immigrant on the run from the authorities. He also fails to realise that his pet caracal - a wild cat that is often domesticated back home - will return to its natural wild state if and when it doesn't receive the necessary training. And in the Welsh border hills there's plenty of space for it to hide. After it mauls a few sheep and pheasants, the hunt is on before it graduates to ...

I’ll be honest (and it’s not like you didn’t see this one coming), I like horror, and I’m partial to a well told ‘Haunted House’ tale, but I picked this book up purely for the title and so I could make my kids giggle when I showed them what I was reading ;o) I mean, wouldn’t you? And they did, every time I showed them. It was great. But enough of that ;o) I’m also easily hooked by an intriguing blurb and the one below did its job. I got reading and ‘Man, Fuck This House’ ended up being another ‘I’m not doing anything else until I’m done reading’ kind of book. Let me tell you all about it. Sabrina Haskins and her family have just moved into their dream home, a gorgeous Craftsman in the rapidly growing Southwestern city of Jackson Hill. Sabrina’s a bored and disillusioned homemaker, Hal a reverse mortgage salesman with a penchant for ill-timed sports analogies. Their two children, Damien and Michaela, are bright and precocious. At first glance, the house is perfect. But things aren...